Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday April 04, 2012 @10:55AM
from the copyright-is-so-20th-century dept.

New submitter CAPSLOCK2000 writes "The Dutch Pirateparty has refused an order from BREIN to take down a proxy to The Pirate Bay. Last month BREIN (the distribution-industries paralegal outfit) forced a number of ISPs to block The Pirate Bay; the first site ever blocked in the Netherlands. Immediately people started using proxies at other ISPs to get to TPB. BREIN then threatened a number of those proxies with legal action. As most of these are run by hobbyists without legal or financial means there was little resistance. Now the Dutch Pirateparty has decided to stand up to the intimidation and refuses to take down its proxy. Today they sent their response in style: by uploading it to The Pirate Bay. In translation: 'The Pirateparty disputes your claim and will not comply with your request.'"
Via Torrentfreak, Pirate Party chairman Dirk Poot: "There are a plethora of proxy sites on the internet. On almost any them TPB can by reached, even with a single URL. That's not even mentioning the ways you can get to TPB if you're willing to put in more effort than saving a single URL. If this keeps going there will be no Internet left by the time BREIN has achieved its goal of making TPB inaccessible. ... In their self-righteous zealousness they have brought substantial damage to the free and open Internet."

As the BREIN lawyers tried to serve a legal document to one of the pirate bay guys via twitter, I suppose that sending replies using similar means is only fair. To bad that they cannot officially read the reply as the website is blocked...

I was about to write a sarcastic reply to the statement, "No law being broken in sight." But K.S.K. is right. The law broken and the law breaker are, indeed, hard to define. The lawbreaker being the government... Hm? The lawbreaker being the corporation that mis-uses a system of law in order to profit... Hmm? We have traditions! Corporations are _expected_ to mis-use the legal system to suit their primary goal.

:: define a corporation as a being that struggles for more profit:: When the result is

Ah, the old argument-by-euphimism. The crime is not simply linking. This is like saying "shooting someone in the head is just moving a few atoms, and we all move atoms, why is this illegal?"

To be as fair as possible to your point, are you suggesting that linking to illegal/banned/infringing content is so indirect that is becomes too easy to accidentally break the law? Or that somehow the indirect nature excuses the evasion if you are doing it deliberately?

So what is the crime? All they did was providing a link to a banned site. Despite their similar ideologies they are not associated in any way with Piratebay.

To be as fair as possible to your point, are you suggesting that linking to illegal/banned/infringing content is so indirect that is becomes too easy to accidentally break the law?

With the number of fake torrents (many of them uploaded by copyright holders) this is actually quite possible. Even without any mischief, there are genuine misunderstandings: some time ago I was searching for Eclipse (free software, distributed on torrent), but most of the results contained some lousy movie about teenage vampires.
But that's not what I

For that matter. Running a proxy is not comparable to a link. Your argument may apply to the legality of piratebay but that is not what''s at stake here. What's at stake is people running proxies which simply serve up what users request.The organization in this case is attempting to demand those proxies be modified to block a site they dislike. That's on a whole other level.It's more like saying "The murderer got to the victim's house by using a toll road. Let's threaten to sue the toll company if they don'

And thus become far more compliant and controllable. That is the long game of corporate fascist states: threaten troublemakers with exposing everything they've done as they foolishly assumed they had a real right to privacy. He who is without sin, feet of clay, and all that rot.

Not so sure; one quote about the Internet is that it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Granted, applying this to their behavior to say that they are strengthening the (future) Internet is very close to the broken window fallacy, so I might just have to leave this post half-

Red == socialist in my book (Socialist Union in Russia, Socialist government in China). Maybe BREIN, RIAA, and others are looking for some socialist-style bailouts and protectionism for their obsolete industries.

BREIN is not a part of government, it is a foundation which lobbies for big media.

However, a recent lawsuit determined that they can have some specifiek ISP's (Ziggo and XS4ALL) to block any and all URL's they seem fit. Think about it, the judge actually gave them the power to have _any_ URL they submit blocked at those providers. I'll repeat for emphasis, as the absurdity demands it: THEY CAN HAVE ANY URL BLOCKED, NO RECOURSE POSSIBLE.

This is currently being appealed by those providers, including mine, Ziggo. However, until a verdict is reached, they have to keep blocking those URLs. I've been unable to access the Pirate Bay for a few months now. When I try, I get a message from my ISP saying they disagree with the blocking, but have to keep blocking it until a verdict is reached.

No other sites are currently blocked to my knowledge. I believe the block is merely implemented at DNS level.

So BREIN are clearly barking up the wrong tree. The verdict was handed to Ziggo and XS4ALL, not the Piratenpartij. If anyone has to block anything, it will be Ziggo and XS4ALL, when BREIN hands them the URL and/or IP address of that particular proxy. Nowhere in the verdict does BREIN get the right to push arbitrary sites around, or to hand out orders of any kind.

Oh, by the way, if BREIN does have that IP address blocked, they automatically commit political censorship, which by itself is enough to drag BREIN into court.